Hardly. Does it boot on raw hardware? Can I pop a Squeak CD in the harddrive and find myself inside Squeak, without having to boot Linux or something else underneath? No. Yes, there has been work on that front, but it's nowhere near an OS yet... although, when it is, I'll be *very* excited.:)
Yeah! And what happened to Linux kernel 2.4.22 and 2.4.99! Or, is that 2.4.999?
Who said version numbers had to be contigious? All they have to do is express the relationship between versions (which is older and which is newer). The biggest problem with this date-based scheme is the lack of information about the stability of the release (stable, release candidate, developer-only...) or it's "importance" (major new revision, minor revision, maintance release, etc).
Riiight... and if I stepped on the San Andreas fault in just the wrong way, I could cause an earthquake!
Seriously, the odds the frying a board by hot-plugging a keyboard into it must be very low... I know I've done it many *many* times with absolutely no problems. Honestly, have *you* ever fried a MB this way?
Aww man... you ruined all my fun. I was so excited to get scared and alarmist, but NOOO, you had to go and be calm and logical. WTF kind of Slashdotter are you??;)
And why oh why can't you understand that that doesn't change the fact that fuel cells are still more environmentally sound, and still only produce water as a by-product? They're more environmentally sound because it centralizes power production, meaning it's generated at large scales, rather than all these mini powerplants we have now. And, funny enough, most power generation methods work more efficiently on larger scales. And more efficiency == more environmentally friendly.
So, while yes, it's useful for people to understand that fuel cells shift the load of power generation, rather than solving the problem, that doesn't change the fact that it's still a far better solution for powering cars than burning hydrocarbons. As such, it's an important, but minor detail, when trying to sell the technology to the masses.
However, I think the challenge for open source is that often times several different groups are writing competing code for competing projects will little consideration of the massive duplication... in efforts
Bah... this comes up so often, and you know what? It's crap. Competition is at the very heart of innovation! You know why the desktop on Linux has come as far as it has? Because of competition. The same thing goes with media players, email programs, and any number of other application domains. The fact is, sure, there's some duplication of effort, but in the end, the competition helps to raise the bar for everyone else.
Moreover, you also assume that, if everyone worked on the same project, then that one project would develop faster. But, as anyone in the software industry knows, this couldn't be further from the truth. More man power != faster development. Plus, these separate projects exist because each one has different goals and values which drive the development process. If they all tried to work on the same project, nothing would get done, simply because no one would be able to agree.
And, speaking of differing goals, the fact that there is choice means the consumer is free to pick the product they like best. For example, in terms of window managers, I like WindowMaker. It fits my needs and has certain features that I really like. There are many who prefer Enlightenment, being big fans of eye candy and ultra-configurability. Others prefer fluxbox because they like something lighter and a little more spartan. The point is, each of these projects has different design goals, and thus different market niches. So, this plethora of choice does nothing but serve the user.
Now, you do have a point in that there are issues with interoperability, in some cases. However, with projects like freedesktop.org, things are gradually improving. KDE and Gnome are slowly converging in some ways (desktop config formats, etc... heck, they may even share gstreamer for multimedia) while remaining independant projects. So, yes, projects working together is a good thing. But to claim that excess diversity is a bad thing is, IMHO, quite naive.
As far as I know, Hubble does not produce true-color images.
Actually, the primary on Hubble has a wavelength range of 110 - 1100nm, where visible light falls in at 400 - 700nm. So, in order to generate true-color images, the HST is used to take three exposures, in red (400nm), green (500nm), and blue (600nm), which are then combined to form the final image. Of course, the conversion isn't perfect, so the resulting image isn't identical to what the human eye would see, but it's pretty close. Nonetheless, the HST is most definitely used to generate true-color images.
Anyway, for a more detailed explanation, you can read this site.
I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with.Net, too.
"I swear, this has become almost an urban legend on Slashdot. Ha, ha,.NET is vaporware and doesn't mean anything. Yeah, we get it. "
Okay, care to explain to me how B follows A in this conversation? There is NOTHING about timothy's original comment that suggests he doesn't understand.NET, or that it's vaporware. All he was saying is that it would be interesting to see the.NET creators interviewed. Seriously, nice strawman, dude.
Personally, I'd love to see MS taken to task over.NET. After all, Microsoft likes to market it as some sort of brilliant, magic cure-all, when it's really just a repackaging of many old concepts into a nice, pretty, buzzword-compliant package.
Err, and how is Chess less "deterministic" and "easy to comprehend"? Heck, Chess has far more formal rules, meaning it's more structured, and hence a more natural fit for computers, since it can be more easily described.
Anyway, even if we can develop computers that are far faster than what we have today, the search space in Chess is FAR FAR smaller than that of Go (due to the more restrictive ruleset and larger board)... a few orders of magnitude smaller. Moreover, the value of a given move in Go is far more difficult to assess, meaning even if you could explore the aforementioned search space quickly, traditional a-b trees would likely be less effective.
So, in essence, I don't expect to see a computer play Go at a pro Dan level in my lifetime.
Yes, but as I mentioned in another post, the real advantage of a space-based telescope is it's deep resolving power (ability to view high-redshift objects). Clearly, an IR instrument makes more sense, in this case. While the hubble provides excellent visible-light observations, ground-based observatories, which are making incredibly impressive observations using adaptic optics, may be able to fill that gap.
Why visible light? One of the great advantages of a space-based telescope is it's wonderful resolving power (although, with adaptic optics, ground-based observatories are getting damned impressive), which allows it to observe very deep sky objects. And, due to redshift, the deepest observations that will be made will be in the infrared and far infrared. So, it seems to me that, in order to explore the ancient universe, it makes more sense to have a telescope with a sensitivity centered closer to the infrared end of the spectrum. Moreover, in order to explore objects deep in our own galaxy, or on the other side of the galactic plane, the only option is infrared observations.
Frankly, IMHO, the obsession with true-color images has more to do with public relations than true science. After all, some of the most interesting, recent discoveries have been in the ultra-long wavelengths (eg, WMAP) and the ultra-short (eg, Chandra).
It is interesting, though, to consider WHY humans have an easier time identifying "valid" choices. As was mentioned in another thread here, the human brain is exceedingly good at pattern matching (in contrast to computers, which have historically been pretty dismal). And Go is exceedingly well suited to pattern-matching-based play (I won't try to justify this, but any Go player would likely agree). As a result, good players have an easier time focusing on "interesting" areas of play.
Well, that's great for you, but there are some people (myself included) who code at work, and then choose to work on personal projects in their spare time. These would, of course, be the same people who develop most of the open source software you've come to know and love. Personally, I wouldn't mind being able to hack on the occasional Python project while I commute... after all, it's difficult enough trying to find the free time to work on my own stuff...
No benefits? You mention gene therapy (the only promise for people with certain types of inherited disorders). But did you realize that some of the most promising cancer research these days involves using bacteria to destroy cancer cells? These techniques are showing *amazing* results in animal models (we're talking complete remission). Imagine if we could custom-build a virus that would latch onto cancer cells and destroy them?
And these kinds of techniques could easily be extended to other areas. Imagine a virus which was designed to only infect malaria parasites? Or a bacteriophage that would wipe out salmonella?
Of course, that's not to say that ethical and safety concerns shouldn't be part of the debate. But don't discount this research just because *you* don't see any benefit. Because, trust me, cancer patients all over the world would probably disagree with you.
Hmmm... the linked document doesn't provide information about what conditions are necessary to cause water to sublimate. The experiment described involves low pressures, but it also relies on a temperature gradient. Would the experiment work if the entire tube was cooled with liquid nitrogen, a situation which would more accurately represent the conditions deep in a shaded lunar crater?
unless that admin has access to the passphrase of the recipient and their private key (assuming some sort of public key encryption), or to technology capable of constructing the private key given the public one.
If it's the former, blame the user (what are you doing giving out your passphrase??). And if you're into keeping secrets from the gov't (and the gov't cares), you should have your secret key (protected by a strong passphrase) stuffed away in a USB key that you keep on your person at all times.
If it's the latter, blame the encryption algorithm and get a better one (since deriving a private key from a public key is supposed to be exceedingly hard... NP-Hard, to be exact).
Numero un: energy density has nothing to do with stability. According to Einstein's famous equations, the pencil I have on my desk stores a massive amount of energy, but I don't see it exploding any time soon. Or, for a more down to earth example, plastic explosives are incredibly stable on their own. Deux: energy conversion efficiency has nothing to do with storage capacity. That's not to say they aren't both issues, but they are by no means directly connected. Trois: WTF? The ability of a cell to hold charge has nothing to do with it's relative "energy level" (for lack of a better term), which is what you're implying. Again, I don't see my pencil mysteriously dissolving away.
the game gear was way too expensive, heavy, and sucked batteries like a drunken prom date
Which means that it wasn't because Nintendo was the only game in town (there *was* Sega, for a while, anyway). But, unlike Sega, Nintendo knew their market. They realized what they valued (portability, long battery life) and what they'd be willing to compromise (pretty, colorful graphics, backlit screen), and then they designed a portable that fit those requirements (unlike Sega), and ended up being the only game in town as a result.
Moreover, Nintendo had the advantage of a massive set of licensees who were willing to port their highly successful titles to the GB. Not to mention Nintendo has a pretty impressive set of titles, themselves (eg, Tetris). So they won out on the library front as well.
The GBA is exactly the same story (although, lack of competition is a much larger issue here, not to mention brand loyalty).
It could work, though. They'd probably need to "emulate" the DirectX API (basically a layer one which passes through/translates calls from the virtual machine to the real hardware, much like the VMWare guest video drivers) in order to obtain any amount of speed. But, on the surface, it seems feasible.
but for domestic violence calls that end up with the cops leaving with no one arrested or even harmed Lovely waste of my money!.
Talk about stupid, short-sighted logic. Cops responding to a domestic disturbance call don't go there just to deal with the aftermath. They also serve to prevent violence in the first place. They can defuse situations before things get out of hand and people really do get hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. Does it boot on raw hardware? Can I pop a Squeak CD in the harddrive and find myself inside Squeak, without having to boot Linux or something else underneath? No. Yes, there has been work on that front, but it's nowhere near an OS yet... although, when it is, I'll be *very* excited. :)
Yeah! And what happened to Linux kernel 2.4.22 and 2.4.99! Or, is that 2.4.999?
Who said version numbers had to be contigious? All they have to do is express the relationship between versions (which is older and which is newer). The biggest problem with this date-based scheme is the lack of information about the stability of the release (stable, release candidate, developer-only...) or it's "importance" (major new revision, minor revision, maintance release, etc).
Riiight... and if I stepped on the San Andreas fault in just the wrong way, I could cause an earthquake!
Seriously, the odds the frying a board by hot-plugging a keyboard into it must be very low... I know I've done it many *many* times with absolutely no problems. Honestly, have *you* ever fried a MB this way?
Aww man... you ruined all my fun. I was so excited to get scared and alarmist, but NOOO, you had to go and be calm and logical. WTF kind of Slashdotter are you?? ;)
It also doesn't help that the show aired in a Friday night timeslot... which is pretty well the death knell for any new show.
And why oh why can't you understand that that doesn't change the fact that fuel cells are still more environmentally sound, and still only produce water as a by-product? They're more environmentally sound because it centralizes power production, meaning it's generated at large scales, rather than all these mini powerplants we have now. And, funny enough, most power generation methods work more efficiently on larger scales. And more efficiency == more environmentally friendly.
So, while yes, it's useful for people to understand that fuel cells shift the load of power generation, rather than solving the problem, that doesn't change the fact that it's still a far better solution for powering cars than burning hydrocarbons. As such, it's an important, but minor detail, when trying to sell the technology to the masses.
My only question is, when will he come out with a klein bong?
:)
Didn't read the FAQ, didja?
However, I think the challenge for open source is that often times several different groups are writing competing code for competing projects will little consideration of the massive duplication ... in efforts
Bah... this comes up so often, and you know what? It's crap. Competition is at the very heart of innovation! You know why the desktop on Linux has come as far as it has? Because of competition. The same thing goes with media players, email programs, and any number of other application domains. The fact is, sure, there's some duplication of effort, but in the end, the competition helps to raise the bar for everyone else.
Moreover, you also assume that, if everyone worked on the same project, then that one project would develop faster. But, as anyone in the software industry knows, this couldn't be further from the truth. More man power != faster development. Plus, these separate projects exist because each one has different goals and values which drive the development process. If they all tried to work on the same project, nothing would get done, simply because no one would be able to agree.
And, speaking of differing goals, the fact that there is choice means the consumer is free to pick the product they like best. For example, in terms of window managers, I like WindowMaker. It fits my needs and has certain features that I really like. There are many who prefer Enlightenment, being big fans of eye candy and ultra-configurability. Others prefer fluxbox because they like something lighter and a little more spartan. The point is, each of these projects has different design goals, and thus different market niches. So, this plethora of choice does nothing but serve the user.
Now, you do have a point in that there are issues with interoperability, in some cases. However, with projects like freedesktop.org, things are gradually improving. KDE and Gnome are slowly converging in some ways (desktop config formats, etc... heck, they may even share gstreamer for multimedia) while remaining independant projects. So, yes, projects working together is a good thing. But to claim that excess diversity is a bad thing is, IMHO, quite naive.
As far as I know, Hubble does not produce true-color images.
Actually, the primary on Hubble has a wavelength range of 110 - 1100nm, where visible light falls in at 400 - 700nm. So, in order to generate true-color images, the HST is used to take three exposures, in red (400nm), green (500nm), and blue (600nm), which are then combined to form the final image. Of course, the conversion isn't perfect, so the resulting image isn't identical to what the human eye would see, but it's pretty close. Nonetheless, the HST is most definitely used to generate true-color images.
Anyway, for a more detailed explanation, you can read this site.
I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
.NET is vaporware and doesn't mean anything. Yeah, we get it. "
.NET, or that it's vaporware. All he was saying is that it would be interesting to see the .NET creators interviewed. Seriously, nice strawman, dude.
.NET. After all, Microsoft likes to market it as some sort of brilliant, magic cure-all, when it's really just a repackaging of many old concepts into a nice, pretty, buzzword-compliant package.
"I swear, this has become almost an urban legend on Slashdot. Ha, ha,
Okay, care to explain to me how B follows A in this conversation? There is NOTHING about timothy's original comment that suggests he doesn't understand
Personally, I'd love to see MS taken to task over
Err, and how is Chess less "deterministic" and "easy to comprehend"? Heck, Chess has far more formal rules, meaning it's more structured, and hence a more natural fit for computers, since it can be more easily described.
Anyway, even if we can develop computers that are far faster than what we have today, the search space in Chess is FAR FAR smaller than that of Go (due to the more restrictive ruleset and larger board)... a few orders of magnitude smaller. Moreover, the value of a given move in Go is far more difficult to assess, meaning even if you could explore the aforementioned search space quickly, traditional a-b trees would likely be less effective.
So, in essence, I don't expect to see a computer play Go at a pro Dan level in my lifetime.
Yes, but as I mentioned in another post, the real advantage of a space-based telescope is it's deep resolving power (ability to view high-redshift objects). Clearly, an IR instrument makes more sense, in this case. While the hubble provides excellent visible-light observations, ground-based observatories, which are making incredibly impressive observations using adaptic optics, may be able to fill that gap.
Why visible light? One of the great advantages of a space-based telescope is it's wonderful resolving power (although, with adaptic optics, ground-based observatories are getting damned impressive), which allows it to observe very deep sky objects. And, due to redshift, the deepest observations that will be made will be in the infrared and far infrared. So, it seems to me that, in order to explore the ancient universe, it makes more sense to have a telescope with a sensitivity centered closer to the infrared end of the spectrum. Moreover, in order to explore objects deep in our own galaxy, or on the other side of the galactic plane, the only option is infrared observations.
Frankly, IMHO, the obsession with true-color images has more to do with public relations than true science. After all, some of the most interesting, recent discoveries have been in the ultra-long wavelengths (eg, WMAP) and the ultra-short (eg, Chandra).
According to the JWST Website, the next generation space telescope will cost "$824.8 million". What were you saying about comparative cost, again?
Lunar observatory? How 'bout the James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch on August 2011.
It is interesting, though, to consider WHY humans have an easier time identifying "valid" choices. As was mentioned in another thread here, the human brain is exceedingly good at pattern matching (in contrast to computers, which have historically been pretty dismal). And Go is exceedingly well suited to pattern-matching-based play (I won't try to justify this, but any Go player would likely agree). As a result, good players have an easier time focusing on "interesting" areas of play.
Well, that's great for you, but there are some people (myself included) who code at work, and then choose to work on personal projects in their spare time. These would, of course, be the same people who develop most of the open source software you've come to know and love. Personally, I wouldn't mind being able to hack on the occasional Python project while I commute... after all, it's difficult enough trying to find the free time to work on my own stuff...
Actually, what you're talking about, virotherapy for cancer, is being researched right now, as we speak. See this Scientific American article.
No benefits? You mention gene therapy (the only promise for people with certain types of inherited disorders). But did you realize that some of the most promising cancer research these days involves using bacteria to destroy cancer cells? These techniques are showing *amazing* results in animal models (we're talking complete remission). Imagine if we could custom-build a virus that would latch onto cancer cells and destroy them?
And these kinds of techniques could easily be extended to other areas. Imagine a virus which was designed to only infect malaria parasites? Or a bacteriophage that would wipe out salmonella?
Of course, that's not to say that ethical and safety concerns shouldn't be part of the debate. But don't discount this research just because *you* don't see any benefit. Because, trust me, cancer patients all over the world would probably disagree with you.
Hmmm... the linked document doesn't provide information about what conditions are necessary to cause water to sublimate. The experiment described involves low pressures, but it also relies on a temperature gradient. Would the experiment work if the entire tube was cooled with liquid nitrogen, a situation which would more accurately represent the conditions deep in a shaded lunar crater?
unless that admin has access to the passphrase of the recipient and their private key (assuming some sort of public key encryption), or to technology capable of constructing the private key given the public one.
If it's the former, blame the user (what are you doing giving out your passphrase??). And if you're into keeping secrets from the gov't (and the gov't cares), you should have your secret key (protected by a strong passphrase) stuffed away in a USB key that you keep on your person at all times.
If it's the latter, blame the encryption algorithm and get a better one (since deriving a private key from a public key is supposed to be exceedingly hard... NP-Hard, to be exact).
So much for "laws" of physics...
Numero un: energy density has nothing to do with stability. According to Einstein's famous equations, the pencil I have on my desk stores a massive amount of energy, but I don't see it exploding any time soon. Or, for a more down to earth example, plastic explosives are incredibly stable on their own. Deux: energy conversion efficiency has nothing to do with storage capacity. That's not to say they aren't both issues, but they are by no means directly connected. Trois: WTF? The ability of a cell to hold charge has nothing to do with it's relative "energy level" (for lack of a better term), which is what you're implying. Again, I don't see my pencil mysteriously dissolving away.
the game gear was way too expensive, heavy, and sucked batteries like a drunken prom date
Which means that it wasn't because Nintendo was the only game in town (there *was* Sega, for a while, anyway). But, unlike Sega, Nintendo knew their market. They realized what they valued (portability, long battery life) and what they'd be willing to compromise (pretty, colorful graphics, backlit screen), and then they designed a portable that fit those requirements (unlike Sega), and ended up being the only game in town as a result.
Moreover, Nintendo had the advantage of a massive set of licensees who were willing to port their highly successful titles to the GB. Not to mention Nintendo has a pretty impressive set of titles, themselves (eg, Tetris). So they won out on the library front as well.
The GBA is exactly the same story (although, lack of competition is a much larger issue here, not to mention brand loyalty).
The x86 version does the latter (virtualization).
It could work, though. They'd probably need to "emulate" the DirectX API (basically a layer one which passes through/translates calls from the virtual machine to the real hardware, much like the VMWare guest video drivers) in order to obtain any amount of speed. But, on the surface, it seems feasible.
but for domestic violence calls that end up with the cops leaving with no one arrested or even harmed Lovely waste of my money!.
Talk about stupid, short-sighted logic. Cops responding to a domestic disturbance call don't go there just to deal with the aftermath. They also serve to prevent violence in the first place. They can defuse situations before things get out of hand and people really do get hurt.